I did something different this time and went to the local camera store to purchase. The price was within $100 of Amazon's price, and I was able to trade in some old gear to bring down the price even lower. That means I am lighter by 1 D80 body, some accessories, and about 3 lenses.

I stopped at the local camera store after work and cheerfully gave them all of my tax refund. I also brought about 2 bags full of photo stuff to trade in and take a bit of sting out of the final sale price.
But my watch tonight is the Maratac mid-pilot quartz.
The new camera is Nikon D750 kit with 24-120mm f4 lens. I have now graduated to full-frame sensor, taking advantage of a limited-

Just a friendly caution. Printers that used to work fine now need to have extra RAM installed to allow a RAM disk.
After I am confident the SSD and transferred data are perfect in the coming days, I will eventually wipe the old 1TB HDD and turn it into my data backup device. Not sure I want to trust a HDD that is 9 years old or so (came with the PC, and it was a "factory recertified"

When I saw the size of my tax refund last weekend, I decided instead of buying the usual photography gear I seem to opt for that I would do something with my photo-editing device. 9-year-old Asus desktop PC still was fine, but there was a bad goaning, cow-mooing sound it would do sometimes that has been getting steadily worse. It had a HDD where I have been getting used to the upgraded performanc

I spent a bit of my tax refund money on some upgrades to my big PC, which would be maxing out the RAM and a new SSD. Last bit arrived tonight (FedEx pulled up to my driveway just as I put the trash bin to the curb). All the parts are installed and the HDD is now cloning to the SSD. Unfortunately the groaning and mooing noises I thought was the CPU fan must be one of the other 2 fans, the new CPU

Yeah, the cut on the thumb is still an issue. Snow has been piling up here, made working today challenging. Still had ice on my driveway from Thursday (can't buy salt anywhere right now) and the snow today on top of that got me stuck in place at home. I had to sparingly spread the little bit of salt I had on hand around the wheels to get out to do some work today.
So CWC W10 quartz again, and

I have been working at the photos I spent all day/night taking on January 20, 2019 at a slow pace. Let's say the lunar eclipse photos were a big fail and will never be worth sharing. But I did get some nice photos of eagles early that day. But it was frigid cold!

I took the photos for this image on 1-20-2019 during the totality phase of the lunar eclipse that night. Temperature that night was well below 0F, was lucky to be even being close to in-focus. My moon photos that night were a disaster, most way out of focus. But all accounts are the Orion Nebula and Andromeda Galaxy are the easiest first subjects for this kind of work.
I took 36 images and sta

I filed my tax return this weekend, and the refund is substantial this time. As in the price-reduced-for discontinuation Nikon D750 + 24-120mm f4 lens kit would be in reach for me.
Nikon D750 kit at Amazon
So this would be my gateway into a full-frame sensor. I went through this similar debate years ago when I settled on upgrading to a DX-format D7000 then. I do have a mix of DX and FX